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Posted Mar 8, 2010
On any typical morning at Luton the airport bustles with people rushing for flights. However the contrast with say 10 years ago or more is startling. It is the dress of the passengers.
Posted Mar 4, 2010
A great piece in The Beat this week on BA's new compensation program in the USA indicates a different tack by BA in its way to try and reform its business.
Posted Feb 20, 2010
Recently ARC (the old Airlines Reporting Corporation) has begin to make some of its vast data more readily available for the marketplace.
Posted Jan 25, 2010
The last three major airline res system cutovers have not gone well for the major players involved. Despite the success of the SITA cutover of the Malaysian Airlines new res system, the next two have been rocky at best. So while I hope not to jinx the next one, let's hope that the Sabre cutover of jetBlue from Navitaire to SabreSonic goes well.
Posted Jan 25, 2010
In what can only be assumed to be a full frontal attack on the Crackberry dominance for the enterprise, both iPhone and Google's Android operating system are making headway into the corporate enterprise. IBM and Lotus Notes (remember them? yes they are still out there) have already released a secure version of a remote tool for integration called IBM Traveler (note the spelling!) for iPhone users. eWeek is now reporting that IBM will release an Android version for the future in likely "2H 2010."
Posted Jan 21, 2010
I have been doing a straw poll among some of our clients and friends to see what their segment incentive fees are from the GDSs. A disclaimer here is that this is from a non-representative sample of agencies. However, I don't think they are atypical. The sample size was from a mixture of major and non-major travel markets worldwide. The reason for doing the poll was because an associate quoted a number of one of his clients to me that I thought was somewhat high. Boy was I wrong.
Posted Jan 10, 2010
Qantas, the first user of the full Altea airline reservation system suite from Amadeus, suffered a major outage (as it turned out "outages" is more accurate as it kept going up and down) on 3 Jan 2010. This follows a separate outage in September and a "meltdown" in November as reported by the main Sydney newspaper. This outage apparently continued on Jan 6th. Of course no official word on the outage on the QF website. A spokesman for QF claimed that there was intermittent outages for about an hour.
Posted Dec 21, 2009
One thing you can say about the European Commission (EC) when it doesn't like something, it acts pretty quickly. With the powers of judge, jury and executioner, the EC has broader powers than those of the usual sovereign state authorities.
Posted Dec 20, 2009
The recent distribution arrangement between Travelport and British Airways should come as no shock to anyone. As widely reported several weeks ago, BA is determined to adjust its distribution mode; the UK airline has re-signed with Travelport. It is also reported to be near an agreement with Amadeus (who also hosts the British carrier). Despite being somewhat battered in the recent downturn, the British carrier is driving to a beat where it lowers its costs for distribution. So lets briefly examine what is has agreed to with Travelport and what it wants to get from the other GDS companies.
Posted Dec 16, 2009
Against a lot of odds, Travelport retained Flight Centre Limited in Australia. Or at least part of the business. The odds were definitely against Travelport. Amadeus had mounted a very strong campaign as had Sabre. Heavyweights went a courting in Brisbane. In the end, it probably came down to the cost of transition rather than anything else. I suspect that the canny people at FCL knew that there were certain concessions that they wanted from Travelport to stay on Galileo.
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